Mario Chanes de Armas

Mario Chanes de Armas, prisoner of Fidel Castro, died on February 24th, aged 80

ON DECEMBER 2nd 1956 Mario Chanes de Armas found himself in a mangrove swamp on the south-east coast of Cuba. He was rocking, faint with sea-sickness, in a 60-foot wooden yacht, the Granma, crammed with 82 people and stinking of spilled petrol. Their equipment had been jettisoned at sea; most of their weapons had been lost among the mangroves. They had no water and now, to cap it all, the troops of Fulgencio Batista were about to fire on them.

With him was Fidel Castro. In all the most striking events of his life so far, this burly, garrulous figure had been beside him. He stood out from the rest, a strange mixture of Oriente farm boy and privately educated lawyer, brimming with self-confidence. Mr Chanes de Armas, though he was 30 too, felt younger and in awe of him.

Together, almost three years earlier, they had tried to storm the Moncada barracks in stolen soldiers' uniforms. Mr Chanes de Armas had patiently accepted his sentence of ten years from the judge, but Fidel had given a four-hour speech of defiance. Together, they served their time in Batista's New Model Prison on the Isle of Pines, eating spaghetti with calamari, lounging about in shorts, while Fidel wrote. Together, they were photographed leaving the jail 22 months later, the result of an unexpected amnesty, waving arms and hats. When the revolutionaries regrouped in Mexico Mr Chanes de Armas found himself, naturally, at Mr Castro's feet. He was trained by him there until, one November night, they boarded the Granma and slipped away, without lights, to drive out dictatorship from Cuba.

There were other dangerous times. Mr Chanes de Armas remembered them in dim, rare flashes as he sat, a frail figure in a wheelchair, in a nursing home in Hialeah in Florida in his last years. The months spent after the Granma invasion in the Sierra Maestra, among the forests and the fog, eating boiled yucca and sweet potatoes without salt; his journey, as a wanted man, to Havana; his arrest in 1958 for going to Florida, secretly, to get dynamite to advance the revolution. But all this seemed to pale beside what had happened to him afterwards at the hands of his friend.

He was a simple man, he always said, and a quiet type. His family made beer, and he would have been happy enough to go into that business for himself. But at school and at union meetings he had been led to think about liberty and democracy, especially by Fidel, who spoke about them better than anyone else. Mr Chanes de Armas got involved in Moncada and the Granma expedition to bring free elections to Cuba, and a proper democratic constitution. As a good marksman, he would do his bit in any fighting. But after the euphoria of toppling Batista in January 1959, his friend proved indifferent to human rights and liberties. He seemed now to be a megalomaniac, his speeches filled with “vehement irrationality” and all power revolving round himself. And, far worse, he had become a devoted communist. That was not the plan. Horrified, Mr Chanes de Armas first punched him, then drifted away.

Planted like a tree

In 1961 he returned to the Isle of Pines. His crime was “counter-revolution”. He was said to have tried to assassinate Mr Castro, but he denied that he had ever been enlisted. The falling-out was personal and ideological. His face had now been airbrushed out of the photographs in which he smiled as Fidel's friend.

Prison was much less comfortable than before. That spring the Isle of Pines had been sown with dynamite, linked up to the wiring system in the prison, so that any American attempt to rescue the prisoners would blow them to smithereens. It was, Mr Chanes de Armas remembered, “like sleeping on a powder keg”. Prisoners—in 1961, around 6,000 of them—were meant to submit to communist “re-education”; he became the leader of those who resisted. He refused to wear the blue uniform of a common criminal, instead going naked or in underpants. He took part in forced labour as slowly as he could, digging ditches or chopping up blocks of marble in the fierce, dripping Cuban heat. For weeks at a time he was put in tapiadas, steel isolation cells, and gavetas, “drawers”, so narrow that he could only stand. He and his followers were called plantados, planted squarely—though sparsely—as trees across Mr Castro's path.

He was in prison for one day short of 30 years: longer than Nelson Mandela, though few noticed. His only son was born and died, at 24, while he was inside; being such a troublemaker, he was not allowed to attend the funeral. On his release, by the good offices of the government of Chile, his first action was to go to the cemetery to place flowers on the grave.

In 1993 he was permitted to leave for Miami. He could have become the darling of the hardline Cuban exiles, but rejected that. He felt no hate, he always said; vengeance was “for cowards”. On the rights and wrongs of the revolution he would not often let himself be drawn; in his last two years, Alzheimer's shadowed everything. But sometimes on the television he would glimpse the flickering figure of a bearded old man his own age; and Mr Chanes de Armas would clench his fist and cry “Carajo!”, his own obscene revolutionary salute.